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In 1956, when civil rights in the American South were little more than a fervent dream, Gordon Parks, Life magazine’s first and only African American photographer, set out to Alabama for a closer look at a shameful social norm: racial segregation.

Parks knew this world first hand. Though he’d broken through in the 1940s as a fashion photographer for Vogue in New York, his own roots in the divided south in Fort Scott, Kan., had left its mark. By the time he got to Alabama, Parks was a star, increasingly able to call his own shots, and this would prove to be one of his most explosive.

Running in the magazine the same year, his photo essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” was a sensation: Captured in full colour, Parks’ pictures, of a multi-generational African American family soldiering on through the quotidian indignities of segregation, were a wide-eyed view into a world the magazine’s mostly white audience had mostly only heard of in ugly news reports: beatings, lynchings, murders.

Parks’ humanizing eye for the daily experience of a close-knit family looking to do nothing more than make their way may not have started the Civil Rights movement, but you can bet it added a bit of fuel to its fire.

It puts on view a selection of images never before seen from that 1956 photo essay — Parks shot about 50; only 20 were used in the magazine — which serve both as a quietly grim reminder of an ugly chapter of recent history, and, given the recent events in Missouri and in New York, where black men have been killed by police with hazy reason or cause, a quiet totem for the importance of vigilance with social change. Parks’ pictures show us not only the distance we’ve traveled, but the winding path it continues to be.

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